Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/97

85 LANGUAGE.] HOLLAND 85 language spoken in the southern and in the northern Netherlands was the same for all practical purposes ; and so it happened that the French literary works and their Flemish reproductions attracted no small share of attention also in the northern Netherlands. The &quot; Dietsch&quot; dialect, in which the oldest and most popular works, such as Reynard the Fox and the works of Jacob van Maerlant, dating from the close of the 13th century, were composed, became the model speech for every one who wanted to address a larger public than that of his immediate vicinity. It was in this | Dietsch dialect that Melis Stoke, an inmate of the monastery of Egmond, composed hia Rhymed Chronicle (c. 1305). From Holland and Utrecht the Dietsch dialect readily found its way farther north. What the Franks had tried to achieve in times long past was now undertaken by the j counts of Holland and the bishops of Utrecht, viz., the ; total subjection of the northern provinces to their rule, j These efforts on the part of the princes just named again made Frankish the dialect of the dominant, Frisian and Saxon the idiorn of the conquered race. In this way Dietsch, i.e., Low Frankish, became the predominant dialect all over the Netherlands. At a time when laws, mutual contracts, and other ! o!Ecial documents issued in Friesland between the Vlie i and the Lauwers are still drawn up in pure Old Frisian, the treaty by which the citizens of Stavoren recognize Count Floris for their sovereign lord in 1292 is written in j Dutch. The contracts drawn up by Frisians on both sides j are nearly always in Frisian, even down to the close of the ; 15th century, though occasionally Dutch was used. In ] deeds of sale, contracts, &c., drawn up between 1490 and 1500, we meet with all possible shades and varieties j of the Dutch dialect, which is seen to be rapidly gaining ground. Still, this substitution of Dutch for Frisian in documents of this nature by no means proves that Frisian ; was falling into desuetude among the country population. A good deal of course depended on the persons who were ! employed to compose the documents above referred to. The | historian of Friesland, Gabbema, writing about 1650, i bitterly laments the decay of the Frisian tongue; and even foreign writers, such as Conrad Gesner, refer to the fac r , in a similar way. But in spite of his lamentations Gabbema submits to the pressure of the times and writes his history not in Frisian but in Dutch. Nay, his friend Gysbert Japix, the cultivator par excellence of Frisian, the national poet of Friesland, wrote the introduction to his Friesche Rijmelerije (&quot; Frisian Rhymes &quot;), and many a manly poem besides, in the same language. They were by no means averse to seeing cultured non-Frisians take cognizance of their literary labours; and to satisfy this ambition, there was no other course open than to employ the language which such eminent men as Marnix, Coornhert, Roemer, Visser, Spiegel, Hooft, Huygens, and Vondel had permanently made the approved vehicle of thought and poetical utterance throughout the Netherlands, more especially after the fall of Antwerp, in 1585, i had induced the most highly cultured minds of the ! southern Netherlands to migrate to Holland. This had been achieved partly by direct endeavours tending to the j improvement of the language and the excision of all i &quot; foreign dross,&quot; partly by the creation of beautiful works j of literary art, and solid contributions to history and j erudition. For the language and intellectual culture of j Holland had now each attained a stage of advancement where neither imperiously demanded new capabilities in the I other. What thus happened in Friesland also took place elsewhere, the same or nearly the same causes bringing about the same results throughout the country. The language of the Dutch has travelled to their trans marine possessions, without engendering a new dialect either in the East or West Indies. But a very different result might be expected if at any time their East Indian possessions should enter upon an independent career. A kind of mongrel dialect would arise, which may be seen foreshadowed in official p.ipers and letters composed by so-called sinjos, or &quot;half-breeds,&quot; in the island of Java. We may even now point to one such dialect, the speech of the Dutch settlers in the Transvaal and the Orange Territory in South Africa, who have actually begun to raise their clipped Dutch to the dignity of a written language, iu which they are now composing works of general litera ture, and even poems, diligently editing class-books and theological treatises, and printing such newspapers as Den opregten Afrikaander. Flemish or South Dutch, i.e., Belgian Dutch, though very nearly allied to North Dutch or the Dutch of Holland, essentially differs from the latter in many important points of detail. In its vocabulary, its phraseology, and the structure of its sentences, it clearly betrays the influence of the French-speaking part of the nation. In a novel by a very popular Flemish author, A. C. van dor Cruyssen, printed in bold type in small octavo, and numbering less than 200 pages, the present writer noted far more than 200 cases in which a North-Dutchman would have chosen quite another turn of expression. The South Dutch dialect, which after the fall of Antwerp had remained almost stationary, but which in our days has become a cultured written language through the diligent efforts of various writers of great talent, bears the evident marks of this recent emergence from a state of utter neglect on the part of cultured men, and to a North-Dutchman has an air of simple-minded artlessness and innocent naivete. The complexity of origin of the Dutch language is most noticeable in the case of the vowels. In the consonants the Saxon and the Frankish did not differ greatly, and the Frisian has had a much smaller, influence. To the Saxon must be ascribed the dropping of the nasal before s, f, th, as well as before b and v, in vj// (five), sedert (sinthe, since), muiden (mouth), in proper names, &c. At the same time there are several words in which the n is pre served, most of these being borrowed from the Frankish, as cinder, kunde, Yselmonde in Holland (alongside of Yselmuiden in Overyssel), and gems (for which we have goeze in the Overyssel dialect). The s in the nom. plur. of the vowel stems is only partially retained: side by side there exist in Middle Dutch plural forms like honde, dorpers, kinder, kinde, kyne, which have almost all in later Dutch assumed either s simply, s after the plural form ?, or en (originally the plural form of n stems), the s and n being erroneously regarded as a sign of the plural (see infra&quot;). On the whole the Frankish influence has been the most potent, that of the other two tongues being only observable here and there in the terminations, or in a comparatively limited number of words and expressions. The ( history of the development of the language may be divided into two great periods. In the first, the Middle Dutch, the fuller forms and long vowels of inflexional and derivational suffixes and the final elements of compound words, which are preserved in Gothic and High German, have already become short and unaccented, while at the same time, through the loss of the accent, the final elements have partly lost their significance, and occasionally a notable abbreviation has been effected both in their pronunciation and their orthography. From the Middle Dutch the modern language is distinguished by a greater neglect and confusion of inflexional forms, by the presence of a large number of foreign words intro duced about the end of the 15th century, as well as of a multitude of dialect and modern terms, and by the disuse or modified significations of many of the older words.